


Back-to-Back

by sleapyGazelle



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fluff and Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 19:33:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13958499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleapyGazelle/pseuds/sleapyGazelle
Summary: Lance is finally getting a chance to check out the private pool in his apartment building. But taking the elevator downstairs proves to be a mistake. Or does it?Prompt: modern au version of the elevator scene





	Back-to-Back

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt by a tumblr anon

Lance gave himself one last look in the mirror. He looked pretty hot in his blue and white swimming trunks, if he did say so himself…. Okay, he looked at least cute. But still! He’d be slaying some ladies at the poolside that evening. He’d just moved into this new apartment building, and call him simple, but one of the main motivations for signing the lease had been the private pool open to residents in the summers. It had opened this week, but so far, he’d been coming back from work just past the pool’s closing time. Now, finally on a weekend, he was going to get a chance to enjoy it. Water was his element, and he couldn’t wait to feel its embrace. 

He grabbed a towel on his way out the door and slipped his key under the doormat so he could get back in. He jogged down the hallway toward the elevator, the slapping of his flip flops amplified in the narrow space. 

Just as he got inside and pushed the button for the pool, a hand slipped between the closing doors, forcing them open again. Lance raised impatient eyes at the person who followed the hand into the elevator, and his face contorted into inexplicable irritation. 

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Lance demanded. The guy who’d just joined him was his across-the-hall neighbor, aloof, stuck-up, always giving off this bad-boy vibe. But worst of all, he was Lance’s old rival from high school. 

_Keith._

Lance would’ve been game to bury the hatchet, let bygones be bygones and all that. But it was not to be. He had decided to hate Keith all over again when they ran into each other on Lance’s move-in day, and Keith had walked right past him without recognition in his eyes. 

“I haven’t had a chance to go to the pool yet,” Keith answered, sounding bored. He was apparently used to Lance’s open hostility by now, having received glares and scowls whenever he’d tried nodding to Lance in the hallway. “I’m gonna go check it out.” 

Lance felt kind of stupid for asking. It was obvious what Keith had in mind, dressed in red swimming trunks, with a white towel draped lazily on his head. Lance tried and failed not to stare at the planes of Keith’s bare chest and toned abs, cursing his own body temperature when it rose to his face. He stepped to the corner of the elevator, letting Keith occupy the other side. He looked anywhere but at the man standing next to him. 

“Look.” Keith’s voice was weary. “You stay on one side of the pool and I’ll stay on the other. We’ll be far away from each other.” 

Lance scoffed but didn’t reply. It was a good plan, he admitted to himself. But he had no time to think any further because all at once, the elevator jerked to a stop and the lights went out. 

_Great._ Lance chanced a look to the side and could see Keith’s indigo eyes narrowed at him even in the dark. _Just great._

Lance took a deep breath and reached for the alarm button. He felt for it in the dark, fingers searching the cold metal until he found what he thought was the right one. The alarm rang out, startling Lance himself. He turned back to see a dark mass lunging at the doors. He squinted to see Keith wedging his fingers into the slit, trying to pry them open.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Lance asked for the second time that day. 

“That the only sentence you know how to say?” Keith grunted, flattening himself against the doors as he pulled at them with his fingernails. 

“You can’t just…pry the doors open! Just wait a few minutes, you hothead; I rang the alarm.”

“It’s the weekend,” Keith explained. “I doubt anyone’s here to respond to that alarm.”

“Um,” Lance looked around the small space nervously, “I’m sure someone will hear it and call the super or something? We should yell for help too.” 

Lance, eyes adjusting to the dark, saw Keith shake his head and step back from the doors. They obviously hadn’t budged an inch. “I’ll get us out of here,” Keith said, before jumping onto the railing, balancing his feet on the adjoining sides. 

“Woah, Keith!” Lance was starting to panic, more from the rescue attempts than the actual entrapment. “You’re gonna fall on your ass! Just get down here and wait a few minutes.” 

Keith paid him no heed, bracing one hand against the wall and reaching for the ceiling with his other. He prodded at it, looking for an opening, finally banging at what must’ve felt like a weak spot. 

“KEITH!” Lance shouted. “You’ll break a cable or something. Stop trying to kill us!” 

Keith looked down, the whites of his eyes shone in the blackness. “Calm down, Lance.”

Lance had a retort on the tip of his tongue, but it died the moment his former rival spoke his name. “You remember me?” he asked dumbly. 

Keith turned his attention back to the ceiling, pushing against it with his arms. “Not at first. But then you started giving me that angry look all the time and I realized I recognized it.”

“Oh.”

“YES!”

Lance looked up to find that Keith had dislocated a panel above the carpeted ceiling, and was now pulling the carpet away from the corners. He’d shifted his body weight a bit to get better leverage, and Lance saw it a moment before it happened. Keith’s foot slipped a fraction of an inch off the narrow railing and he shot out an arm to catch himself, but there was nothing there. Before he knew what he was doing, Lance reached out and pushed his hands against Keith’s middle, holding him up. 

“Be careful,” he scolded without looking up. 

“…Thanks.” Keith’s voice sounded like he was smiling.

Lance held him up until he balanced, pulling his hands away and trying not to think about how they tingled, or about how his heart felt like he’d already done a few laps in the pool. 

Keith hopped down and looked at the dead console that should’ve been showing what floor they were on. “We were like on the third floor when we stopped, right?”

Lance nodded, then remembered how dark it was and said, “Yeah.” 

“There’s a shaft up there that we can cross into. It leads down but we might get hurt if we jump…Depends on what the landing’s like.”

“Oh my god, we’re not going to jump down three floors.” Lance was going to die being rescued from an elevator by his hothead rival. What a lame way to go. 

“Two,” Keith corrected. “Third to second is one flight and second to first is another.” 

“Yeah, whatever, dropout,” Lance said irritably. “We’re not jumping. Let me see; help me up.”

Keith held out his hands, and Lance stepped on them, pulling himself up, peeking through the open panel in the ceiling, and spotting the opening of the shaft. It looked wide enough for… “Okay let me down.” Once his feet were planted solidly on the floor, he fixed Keith with a determined gaze. “You said you wanted to get out of here right? Well have you ever seen _The Emperor’s New Groove_? 

“Yes? What does that have to to with—”

“We’re gonna climb down! Back to back, just like Kuzco and Pacha.”

Once Keith was done grumbling about how stupid this plan was, shutting up after Lance asked if he had anything less dangerous in mind, they climbed up through the panel, linked arms back to back, and began their descent. 

It was slow going. The first few steps were the hardest, Lance’s feet fumbling every time he realized how much of his bare skin was currently pressed against Keith’s. He forced himself to think past the searing contact, past the way he could feel Keith’s muscles literally rippling against him. Once they found a rhythm, they made decent progress. Lance estimated they’d gone down an entire floor before Keith pushed hard against him and they slid down a few feet. 

On the verge of panic, Lance pushed his feet against the wall and his back against Keith, who pushed back, and they steadied again. 

“Quit pushing too hard!” Lance demanded. 

“You’re not pushing hard enough,” Keith bit back. 

They sighed and resumed again, left-right, left-right, finding that rhythm again. 

“You know I always wondered why you seemed to hate me back in high school,” Keith said very suddenly, and Lance’s foot stalled. He felt them losing balance and planted his foot firmly again. “I still wonder…” Keith added. 

“I didn’t,” Lance admitted, proud of himself when he was able to keep moving steadily despite that confession. He’d always thought Keith was ridiculously cool, with his top grades and devil-may-care attitude. His issues with authority made him so interesting, so much the opposite of Lance who’d always been a people pleaser. But he’d seemed arrogant and never noticed Lance, who decided that if they weren’t going to be friends they’d be rivals. Lance had worked hard to beat him, only succeeding when Keith apparently dropped out, having disappeared without explanation. Lance had felt jealousy, admiration, resentment maybe. But never hate. “I still don’t,” he added. “But that doesn’t mean I like you.”

He felt Keith’s laughter in his own back. “I don’t like you either, Lance.” 

They descended the rest of the way in a comfortable silence, bodies now moving together more fluidly, left-right, push-pull. They made it out of the shaft and into a small room, finding a door that led to another and then another…which was locked. 

“No! What the hell!” Keith exclaimed banging against the door. 

“I told you we should’ve stayed in the elevator,” groaned Lance. 

“What? How would that’ve been better?”

“People would at least know to look for us there,” Lance reasoned. 

“I’m not climbing back up there.”

And yeah, that was fair. They looked around at their surroundings; it seemed to be a little back office for the super, which meant the locked door should open into the basement’s hallway. So they had climbed down three floors after all! Lance was about to rub this in Keith’s face when both of them noticed the wall-mounted phone at the same time. They exchanged a glance, and Lance dashed over to it, keying in the first number he could think of. 

“Hunk? I’m gonna need a favor buddy.” 

* * *

Hunk managed to find the number of the super, who grumbled, but came over to let Keith and Lance out of his office. Then he grumbled some more about how they could’ve broken their necks and he didn’t want to deal with broken-neck amounts of paperwork so they’d better take the stairs next time. 

That was fine. Lance had sworn off elevators for a while at least. They took the stairs up to the lobby, and Lance was thinking about how he already missed his bed, when Keith spoke behind him,

“Now, how about that pool?”

A smile grew on Lance’s face and he didn’t bother hiding it when he turned around. “Let’s go.” 

They forgot all about staying on opposite ends when they got there.

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr: [writing blog](https://sleapywolfwrites.tumblr.com/) | [VLD sideblog](https://sir-klancelot.tumblr.com/)


End file.
